


Auto-da-fé

by Nagat



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Altered Mental States, Dream Sex, Drug Abuse, Headaches & Migraines, Implied/Referenced Murder, Implied/Referenced Necrophilia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Narrator typical misogyny/denial/homophobia combo, Nightmares, Somnophilia, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 13:42:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19465180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagat/pseuds/Nagat
Summary: When pills and cold water managed to cool his overheated organism, he was shivering, cold sweat rising on his forehead. I spent some time beside his bed trying to figure out how could I help him, just to realize I cannot do anything. He was delirious, reacting to me probably without realizing who am I. Without his glasses, he couldn't even see me properly, not that it mattered. He accepted the offered water, but he didn’t say anything, struggling just to hold the glass. It was weird to see these strong hands without their typical power. Still, his breath was deep and calm.That was the last time I saw him awake in five days. After that the exhaustion finally hit in and he fell asleep.In which Richard is left with left alone with his mind and unconscious Henry for a few days. Henry has to wake up from his coma to tell Richard he's wrong about everything. Contains some ostentatious necrophilic imaginery and Nick Cave references.





	Auto-da-fé

These few weeks I spent waiting for the next semester seemed to be incredibly long. Not that living with Henry was difficult, he was an incredibly quiet flatmate and pleasant company, but I suffered of ennui. A big part in that matter had my illness, which did not haunt me anymore, but left me for some time bound to the house, which I found insufferable. My boredom was multiplied when Henry himself fell sick.

I realized something was wrong when I saw him standing in the kitchen, watching the kettle like he was determined to force it to boil water quicker by staring at it. After it boiled he prepared his tea and then suddenly, like he just changed his mind, took a glass and poured cold water in it. He left with water, leaving his tea there without even looking at it. His movements were mechanical, but I noticed the hand carrying the glass was slightly shaking.

I gave in to my curiosity and followed him few minutes later under the pretext of bringing him his tea. I found him lying on his bed, eyes closed.

‘I just have a headache.’

His voice didn't tremble. In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me it is severe migraine paroxysm, probably accompanied by vertigo or negative scotoma, judging from the instability of his previous movements. Henry’s headaches were one of the ugliest things I have ever seen. He had to be in terrible pain already, but his voice didn’t even tremble. He had the most impressive self control.

‘Would you like more water?’

He answered without opening his eyes ‘Not now, thank you.’

After a few minutes I brought him a glass anyway to check on him. He was breathing hard, body flushed and his wrinkled forehead was covered with cold sweat. I tried to be as silent as possible, knowing one of migraines characteristics is often phonophobia, but he just laughed.

‘De minimis non curat praetor.’

Still, he did not open his eyes.

I pulled the curtains over his window without any commentary. I would swear I saw him smile in the darkened room.

Henry was very closed about his illness and preferred not to seek help from others. He wouldn't bother twins or Francis because he wouldn't want them to be worried and his requirement of an absolute discretion excluded Bunny from the start, for obvious reasons. Not that Bunny would ever voluntarily help Henry, keeping up with his Bossie Douglas persona.

Later he told me that the severity of these headaches can often be regulated if spotted in time.

‘I made the mistake of not taking pills immediately,’ he said. ‘I didn't expect it to be serious, so soon after the previous one. There is usually a longer pause between.’

To me, Henry's headaches were enough to prove the major flaws of our health care because there was no acceptable cure and painkillers had a tendency to stop working over time. Henry’s migraine had extremely quick increase and, even under the influence of pills, lasted for days, turning Henry into the state which I can describe only as barely alive. Once the initial pain has started it got worse since then.

When pills and cold water managed to cool his overheated organism, he was shivering, cold sweat rising on his forehead. I spent some time beside his bed trying to figure out how could I help him, just to realize I cannot do anything. He was delirious, reacting to me probably without realizing who am I. Without his glasses, he couldn't even see me properly, not that it mattered. He accepted the offered water, but he didn’t say anything, struggling just to hold the glass. It was weird to see these strong hands without their typical power. Still, his breath was deep and calm.

That was the last time I saw him awake in five days. After that the exhaustion finally hit in and he fell asleep.

For the first day I was thinking of repaying my debt, which was left after my own illness by staying beside Henry’s bed. But soon I realized my effort is going to be fruitless. Where I was continually gaining consciousness during my fever, he remained in a deep sleep, completely unresponsive. Either pills or the headache itself managed to put him into an almost comatose state.

Still, I found myself visiting him regularly in case he woke up and needed something. As a matter of fact, I also couldn’t find more productive things to do. I wasn’t able to go outside, except maybe for a short grocery shopping, which wasn’t necessary, and after being confined to bed for such a long time I was sick of my room. Instead, I kept checking on Henry, trying to keep a track on his body temperature (cooler, but in a norm) and breathing (shallow, but migraine pills are known to cause sleep apnea.)

This lasted for days. Even though my intention was to maintain my distance, in the end, I brought a book, reading it on a chair next to his bed, craving any illusion of company. I picked up from Henry’s library some work on gardening. It made me think of my medical years.

As I clearly remember, many of my medic classmates weren't very percipient of migraines, especially when came to female patients, which are naturally more inclined to have severe headaches. The best prescribed cure back then, were heavy doses of codeine, sumatriptan or oxycodone hydrochloride, which led medics to start a trend of recommending alternative solutions such as special drinking regime and sleep hygiene. They were suggesting that patient’s ailment is caused by wrong lifestyle choices more than by an actual neurological disorder. There was no wonder patient often decided to take things in their own hands and ended up with over-the-counter aspirin or opioid analgesics.

I thought of Thompson and Coleridge, who used opium to ease their pain, physical or not, of romantic poets, smoking opium from long pipes in the back rooms of Chinese underground clubs. Dark eyed men of regency era, serene and lifeless. I imagined how Henry would look like, high on opium, his limbs spread over a lounger with smoke surrounding him. Maybe he would smile with his mouth half-opened before becoming completely lethargic.

They say people look peaceful when they sleep. Peacefulness is associate with delight, happiness even. That wasn’t Henry’s case most of all he looked steady, somehow dignified. It was that little tension which lingered on Henry's forehead. The way his jaw was shut. Maybe, under the influence of opium, he would finally relax. I had my share of an experience with opiates these days, as codeine was a part of my medication. Opiates were praised for an ability to calm the breath and genius mind. While Henry definitely didn't need the former, he would deserve some rest. Maybe even if the price was losing breath completely. Would he die like that, a victim to opium overdosing? By that time I was already tuned to his breathing rhythm. I could easily imagine his breathing slowing so much it stopped completely. Absorbed by overcoming silence, I was getting lost in my own head. I found myself staring at his chest, which was barely moving already, wondering if I would even notice if it stopped.

I was walking around unkempt riverside. Mild evening sun was illuminating water, giving its usual muddy color a tinge of red, making it look like melted copper. I recall pleasant smell of water inviting me to go to the stream where warm mud would gently wrap around my naked feet, sinking me deeper into a soft riverbed. It was a very peaceful place. Spindly flowers and waist-high grass and the shadows kept away from me, as I made the way in the safe distance from the slope. There was no sound except for the rustle of the watergrass and the river itself.

Yet I was searching for something. Something which was pulling me closer to the water, making me leave the track and explore the river bed, thickly overgrown by reedmaces and clubrushes. They were taller than me, making me feel like I should go back, but there was still that need of searching whatever was behind these weeds. I kept stumbling over things I didn't dare to inspect closely and water-soaked ground was betraying me under my feet, but I didn't try to support myself with surrounding vegetation in fear I’d cut myself. I made my way through peats and sinking soils and just as panic started to getting me, I’ve sunk in the river bank.

I already knew what will I see there, washed up on shore between stones.

The river gave him back, but it was just a matter of time before it took him again. He was still half way in water. His hair and a white shirt were fully soaked and his face was turned away from me, sparing me a look at glossy eyes and cold blue lips, probably stained by blood froth. Under the protective coat of river sludge I could see many discolourations some līvor mortis, some in size of fingertips which I found familiar. As the river surrounding he was blooming too. His neck looked like an abstract watercolor painting, various shades of violet melting together in almost black line on his transparent skin, which was broken in some places revealing once violent red, now already white on the edges. There was something bewitching about them. I looked down at my hands.

The dirt and blood under my fingernails haven’t washed out yet.

I woke up in the chair by Henry's bed, more confused that frightened. He was still lying there, in the same position as in the last three days.

Unmoving. Silent. Dead.

I couldn't stand looking at him. I had to fight the urge to run to my own room. Instead, I went to the kitchen and poured myself generous amount of whiskey, which didn't go together with medications I was still using but I in that moment couldn't care less.

When I was drunk enough that my heart started to beat normally I went to my own bed, but I didn't manage to fall asleep again that night. I even tried to fall asleep and concentrate my mind on that dream so I could go back and fix whatever was left to be fixed to gain my own peace, even if it meant to just push Henry's body deeper into the stream. But as the night continued and I was still completely lucid I realized it won't go anywhere, no white butterflies, no resolution.

It wasn't the death what concerned me, I was no stranger to weird dreams nor symbolic morbidity. When I was at high school, I had often a dream where I was leading my mother through some water, darkness surrounding us. We were walking slowly because she kept staying behind and I knew I had to take care of her because my father wasn't there. Of course, he rarely appeared in my dreams, or when people needed him in general. There were other people in the water, searching for a way out and their faces often changed, but what stayed the same was the song I’ve heard coming from an unknown source above me. This dream repeated countless times during at least two years and I found something about it inexplicably unsettling. Later, when the dream finally disappeared, I realized it was probably triggered by that certain song because it was often played in the radio my mother listened while preparing breakfast. My theory was confirmed when the dream never returned to me after I left the house.

But something about this dream with Henry kept occupying my mind. The violence of it seemed off.

It kept haunting me even during the day. Every interpretation I could come up with was deeply unsettling. I did not feel any anger towards Henry, nothing which would explain the product of my unconscious mind. The best explanation of unexplainable dream is always an association, which, as occurred me, could work in this case, for wrath is the first word in the Iliad.

Maybe that's what connected Henry and violence in my brain, I thought. As Aristotle's first law of Associationism says, human mind inevitably ties related subjects together. It's not hard to figure out why would I have Henry connected to the Illias in the first place. Being exposed to Henry's knowledge of the subject made everyone naturally accept Homer as a part of ἰδέα of him.

Now, of course, I do realize I got quite carried away with my assumptions, since subconsciousness isn’t that complex. I suppose it was my overthinking in combination with the lasting effects of illness, that set my visions off. Watching Henry, still and white, like the Lady of Shalott washed up to the riverbend made me think of death as all these soldiers coming back from war described it.

The ones from Africa reported, on the sun the death is fast. Dead body decays to skeleton very quickly as sunburns liquids out of it and the meat is eventually eaten by bugs and animals. In dry places or under right conditions bodies can be gone in a few days and it doesn't even smell much. Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature. Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint; But in water body doesn't decompose quickly. It gets puffed up, the skin starts to dissolve. It's messy, smelly and it lasts long. Organisms in water work slowly and in some cases bodies in water never really decompose, because bacteria won't survive the coldness of deep water. These bodies never come back to the surface, they fall deeper and deeper they get the water gets thicker and colder until they are crushed by the pressure which is the only thing stopping the bottom of the ocean from turning into a massive graveyard.

I’ve always wondered if one could taste them in water.

The dream kept occupying my mind and there was no one who could help me to solve it. Insecurities overflown me, although I was never one to seek approval or guidance of others. I found myself missing Henry's collected thoughts. Today I realize how much we all were dependent on him. Like Sherlock needed Watson we felt need to consult our ideas with Henry, who always provided a constructive commentary. In this silence, I found myself utterly lost. I tried to imagine what he would say and when I failed I tried to recall any previous conversation with similar subject we had.

Henry laid still in his bed, in the same position I left him in and I found myself studying his face with a precision of a painter, who I wasn't.

With nothing better to do, I kept coming to his room, observing him like he was one of these long dead popes, exposed in the St. Peter's Basilica and memorizing every inch of his face. Wide cheekbones and maybe too defined nose and jaw, the scar hidden under a wave of dark hair, eyes seated deep and lips, which, in comparison to the rest, held almost no shape. In the white light of the winter’s day, which I’ve allowed into the room, he reminded me of a Pre-Raphaelite painting brought to flesh, laying there, pale, with breath almost unnoticeable.

He really did look like some bizarre delineation of Ophelia - a body washed up on shore, creating a decadent image of beautiful tranquillity, but still looking ready to get up and speak. To accuse me of things I had done and maybe even ones I haven’t. Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t. By Cock, they are to blame.

I wondered why he still took these pills if they made his comatose for days. Maybe he found it better to sleep than to deal with pain. Or he had migraine hallucinations. I knew the migraine influenced dreams can be vivid, there is a reason they were called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I wanted to know how far behind the glass Henry is.

I needed someone to offer me guidance. I would consider to look for an answer in another higher source. If I have believed in God at that point.

In the dim light of a winter afternoon he looked like developing cyanosis, visible parts of his skin turning into marble. His cheeks were sagging, deep into his face and the sharp bone structure was becoming visible.

‘Henry, do you believe in dream analysis?’

I didn’t get my answer, of course.

At that moment, he wasn’t the most intellectually stimulating company, but his presence was at least peaceful. I don't think I have ever taken part in something this intimate.

That night he came to my room.

He stood beside my bed looking like he could just vanish and become one with other shadows. His tall form seemed to be ridiculously fragile in the moonlight, it gave his skin bluish discoloration. His eyes were opened and illuminated by shallow light coming from outside, in their paleness they looked even more expressionless and blank than usual.

I wanted to say something. I wanted him to say something. To ask me to stay for the night with him. His lips didn't move and I wasn't going to talk first as something stopped me before questioning his presence. I pulled him on me instead and he let me do it without any resistance like I was handling a mannequin. His body was heavy and cold against mine. I looked into his eyes and found them unfocused, so blurry I would be able to see myself in them like in the mirror if I looked close enough. In that moment I realized what is going on. I took his wrists and inspected veins. They were unnaturally dark and clearly visible under the transparent paperlike skin, a sign of heavy overdosing with sumatriptan. Sulfhemoglobinemia. Very rare and possibly lethal integration of sulfur into the hemoglobin molecule.

I have a very good memory, I rarely forget anything and chemistry was one of the subjects which I acquired thoroughly back in my medical studies. Now I looked at his wrists fascinated by how veins can be filled with blood so green it is almost black. I felt a sudden desire to break the skin to cut him open to see his blood uncovered. Instead, I put his wrist to my lips and sucked hard like I could return life to that empty body.

His lips parted just slightly, but enough for me to notice. I wanted to see how far he would allow me to go before he stops me. Before he makes any noise. And then I realized he won't. I was here for him as he was here for me. I took his face into my hands and breathed in his parted lips as he, with a movement quite lethargic, pushed the pants of my pyjamas down. I didn’t dare to blink and miss the opportunity to examine his face closely. He didn’t move any facial muscles, yet there was something soft but dull in his eyes, which I’d compare to atonement, if I didn’t know better. His touch was cold like the rest of his skin and I felt like I was getting fever but it did not matter. I wanted to push him on the bed and get him under me, claim him and bond us together forever with our seed, exactly like would so many philosophers of the past do in order to seal their intellectual and spiritual connection, but he didn't let me. I have always been a lucid dreamer. Self-consciousness in REM sleep is an advantage of higher intellect, but in that moment I was frozen.  
My mere mind was paralyzed and I wasn’t able to influence anything.

His body was suddenly solid and hard around me, the complete opposite of his previous pliant state. I tried to get him off me, but his arms were incredibly strong. So were his thighs. I realized he was sitting on me wearing nothing but his shirt, his muscles showing under marble skin more defined than I anticipated. It was too much. I wished he would go pliant in my arms again, docile and soft, but now his body was hard to grasp and full of sharp edges. His eyes were still empty, but now they focused on me. I struggled under him helplessly. I wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and choke any sound out of him, to put my fingers in his eyes and push until they are pale no more, to dig my nails into his white skin where the black veins manifested themselves spilling the dark blood all over my body. Bath in his fluids and devour his flesh. Instead, I submitted and let him to gain the control to rule over me once again.

He moved on me and I held desperately on his body, running hands over his neck, torso, thighs, looking for pulse in major arteries and feeling none. He pierced me with his too pale eyes for the whole time, like he was looking straight through me. This dead cold touch wasn't what I wanted, yet I whined. Everything was blurry and he was wet and tight against me. He didn't allow me to touch him thoroughly, pinning me down when my touches got to close to his groin. Nothing I did could warm him up and he didn't make any noise, not even breathed noticeably. Nothing to let me know if he was a real conscious being or just an empty shell, a thing I couldn't save anymore.

The whole encounter was more clinical that intimate. I don't even know if I was inside him or not and I’m not certain if I want to know the answer. Maybe I like the idea he let me in at least like this. That night I felt like I’ve entered Hades and reborn again.

I woke sweating and alone in my room with nothing but a crumble in my stomach and dirty sheets.

When I checked Henry I found him sleeping deeply in the exactly same position in which I left him a day before. Just his glass on the nightstand was empty.  
I refilled it for him.

The day, which followed, was restless and I fail to remember most of it. Some moments seemed infinite and some perhaps didn't even happen. The lack of sleep invoked a state of altered consciousness.  
I was T. S. Lawrence caught in the infinite desert of loneliness and guilt and as him, I could not explicitly express my worries by words and thoughts, instead my mind chose encrypted messages of sorrow and violence. Of masochism.

I don’t have a satisfying explanation for the nature of my dream. I never thought of Henry as about sexual being. Obviously, I was aware of his genuine beguilement by Camilla, yet I couldn't think of him engaging in a physical aspect of this relationship. It would make sense to an outsider that he seemed to be more of an old-fashioned kind of a scholar than a lover, but I knew better. In my mind, he assumed positions which resembled an artist or a knight devoted to his lady, protecting her, guiding her steps and loving her unconditionally while keeping their relationship strictly platonic. 

I found myself keeping a distance from Henry's room, making excuses to get as far from him as possible, without having to leave the house.  
But I longed for company. I was frightened and desperate to speak to someone so I picked up the phone and called the number, but then I realized how stupid would I sound, ‘Hello, I just wanted to hear anyone’s voice.’ thus I hung up.

In the end, I went to his room again. I was drowning in my loneliness, I desperately wished for him to wake up, in my thoughts I pleaded him, ‘Wake up. Talk to me. Give me something to hold on or else I die.’ Which he didn’t of course.

I do admit the role my morbid voyeurism played in my nightly visions. Unmoving sleeping bodies have their appeal, as they depict death without the ultimacy of it.  
I became quite lost in watching Henry’s pale figure sinking deeply into the pillow depicting a swan-like death.  
Yet the price I paid for my confusion was cruel and inhuman. As Catullus I hated and loved and was torn in two for my emotions seemed to be punished by my mere self.

While it is hypocritical not to connect the fascination by sleep with death, pretending that there is no connection between death and sex is even more sanctimonious. It is a connection between the end and the beginning of the mere existence and sleep or orgasms are ritual reminders of these fatalities of the lifetime.

The sleeping beauty syndrome is the wrong term anyway. The story was meant to be nothing but exploration of the connection between death and sexuality for the distanced position of relative safety.  
Originally, it was the Snow White, in her glass coffin, whose beauty was exposed to the world even after her decease. The later alterations of the motif were meant to pamper audience, which was not able to accept horrifying implications of the original story.  
Where was the dead body, there was now a deeply sleeping woman. A moral censorship introduced a simple symbol of a kiss in the story which was not about love between a man and a woman at all. Snow White was brought to life by the only lasting form of love a woman can feel, by a child, which she gave birth to, in the glass coffin, when her price was again far far away.  
As Henry said at that mist, when we watched the valley below, corpses, in their idea, can become delightful in a work of art.

I wished he would say something now.

‘I'm not wrong, Henry, am I?,’ I asked him in hope for a response which knew would never come.

It is as natural as death itself. Greeks were the first Europeans to associate sex with death in literature, even before Tristan and all these notorious love tragedies, in archaic times of maiden songs which survived the fire in the library of Alexandria. Greek women sang ‘ _With desire which loosens limbs, she makes glances more melting than sleep and death_.’ proving there was always a place for death in human sexuality. All these dead loves, created by collective imagination, Lady of Shalott, Snow White or Bluebeard’s wives, dead and exposed to the world ad ultimum were nothing but natural fascination with life cycle and its rites.

‘I'm not wrong.’

Henry laid in his white sheets, silent and peaceful. Passive. Unable to respond or take any action.

At that moment I felt overtaken by anger. He wasn't there anyway. Gone was his brilliant mind, witty answers. What is more cruel than be with someone and then leave.  
He was laying there, pliant and inviting, when I realized that passivity wasn't meant to be offering, but provoking.  
I thought I perhaps wished to take him, but no. He wanted me to long for him. I refused. I refused to take his body, however inviting he made it to be.  
Angered, I went to my room and slammed the door behind me. I wasn’t going to risk more restless nights. I knew the drill. Taking more than 20mg of zolpidem would be too risky, therefore I had to take the remaining pill and enhance its absorption. That could be done by various ways, but based on my previous experiences I decided to use caffeine as a catalyst substance. While pure caffeine would be better, of course, but I didn't want to risk a fatal miscalculation which could lead to overdosing. I’ve crushed pills to dust and snorted them while I drank my coffee, a trick I’ve to thank Judy for.

Of course, as everything in that period of my life, even this misfired.

At least that night my dream was different.

I knew it from the start because she was there. I thought of myself as an omniscient observer of the scene until she suddenly looked at me. The suddenness of it petrified me. There was something different about her, she seemed lighter and somehow dull, like she was absorbing the light around us and not reflecting any of it.

She called me to her. Not with her voice, just staring, using her will to lure me to the ground. I knew what would happen to me if I did. Her eyes were vicious.

Suddenly I suspected was not her, my Camilla, that there was something else inside her petite body, something so massive and powerful it was deforming my reality, that the visual distortion I was experiencing wasn’t just an optical illusion, but that she was literally pulling our surroundings inside her, like was a center of the gravity field. 

‘Would you come down here?’ she said. ‘Would you come down here, so we can speak?’

‘Where is he?’ I asked unwisely. I was terrified.

‘I can show you if you come here. Would you like to see?’

She stood there like terrible death, like Lady Macbeth. All my fears manifested with ancient anger in her veins and the cruelty of old goddesses. 

I realized she knew everything. 

These moments before I managed to wake up seemed infinite. Her will was dragging me to her and I knew that in her presence I would find my end. 

It was the middle of the night when I woke, thirsty and sweating. While previous dreams were just unsettling or wrong, this one was straight up a nightmare.  
When I went to the kitchen to get a drink, I desperately needed, on top of it all, I’ve almost received a heart attack.

It took me a few seconds to realize that the figure standing by the kitchen window wasn't a wrath coming to punish me for the sins of my mind.

‘Henry-’ Suddenly I forgot everything I longed to tell him. I wasn't sure if I’m dreaming or if he was really there.

‘Do you feel better?’

He didn't look at me.

‘Better, yes. Unfortunately, I am not yet fully recovered. It will take one more day.’

He kept staring out of the window, a gray light reflected by sparkling snow was illuminating his face, making it even paler. He reminded a figurine, like his real self was replaced by his spare, a mere copy of a man I knew, a wax-like figure. His eyes looked tired.

“It won't rain until February.”

I like to think he meant something by that, but it was probably just a lasting influence of the headache.

**Author's Note:**

> Woah woah.  
> Get a crypt you two.


End file.
